Comrades,
Today, in no particular order;
This long Wired piece on Marcus Hutchins, who went from a 15 year-old coding bank fraud malware to stopping the WannaCry virus dismantling half the internet.
This film which I think might end today so be quick (so bored of these fuckin week-long uploads, time doesn’t exist anymore lads get with the programme). It’s by Naeem Mohaiemen & is a good addition to his series on the ‘supporting actors’ and general failure of various 70s revolutionary projects, this time touching on Sartre’s visit to Andreas Baader, Bangladeshi Maoist guerillas & German Green ‘traitor’ who ‘sold out’ street violence for government.
This interview on Pinko on the policing of marginalised communities under Covid & the parallels with the criminalisation of people with HIV, non-consensual data gathering & community / anarchist approaches to healthcare is wide-ranging & super interesting.
This short piece on US art museums fucking over their staff (surprise surprise) is another welcome call to abolish the fucking art world and replace it with literally anything else.
This amazing film by Deimantas Narkevicius (shared on twitter by Juliet Jacques) w/ Peter Watkins on his approach to film-making & history & where his work sits inbetween fiction & reality & documentary and video-art. Particularly interesting in conjunction with the Mohaiemen film cos sometimes I watch stuff like that and it reminds me of that Godard quote I can never remember or find that is essentially ‘anyone who makes films for the gallery lacks ambition’. What is the difference between an ‘artist film’ or ‘essay film’ or ‘documentary’ and who cares / whats the benefit of the categorisation?
I also watched this amazing panel put together by Autograph on Disability and Digital (Im)mobalisation which was super enriching, touching on access and AI and technological bias and community and speculative fiction and all kinds of stuff and just cutting through a lot of bullshit and showing what is extremely achievable - i.e inviting the community to discuss what directly impacts them, having live-captions and BSL interpretation, what should be the bare minimum. Really worth the time if any of that is of interest to you and it should be. Big up Livvy what a legend.
Anyway that’ll do - see you tomorrow morning I hope.
P x